Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss a question I raised a while ago. We have passed legislation since then in which the mandatory one-year detention as well as some of the concerns that I had expressed during question period have been addressed in part.
I want to reinforce a couple of points. One is with regard to image and to highlight the creation of a crisis where one really did not exist. That is what led to the legislation being introduced and ultimately passed by the House of Commons. I am referring to a newspaper article which was accompanied by a big picture showing the Ocean Lady and the Prime Minister standing beside the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. Seventy-six Tamil refugees had landed on the west coast back in 2009. That sent a very powerful image across the country. It made a lot of people significantly upset. Actually two ships were involved.
These were the images that were relived when the government came forward with its anti-smuggling legislation. Some very strong actions were being taken by the government. The line was that it was getting tough on human smugglers, profiteers and so forth. In reality, it had more of a negative impact on refugees. Quite often refugees are victims. In this particular case, they showed up and the government made them victims again.
I appreciate that some amendments were brought forward. We believe that judicial oversight is critically important when dealing with the whole refugee file. There has to be a process that is fair not only to Canadian society, but also to the refugees.
Canada has a very strong role to play throughout the world in terms of trying to deal with the refugee issue. We take in a very small percentage of the overall number of refugees throughout the world, but we do play a significant part in terms of our population and the number that we do bring in. Canadians as a whole support our doing so.
Having said all of that, one of the outstanding issues I have has to do with the tour we took to visit the detention centres. I would look to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to provide comment on that. There is quite a bit of difference between detention centres. The one in Vancouver is in the basement of the airport. The one in Toronto, I would suggest, is the ideal type of detention centre.
I do not want to change the topic, but perhaps the parliamentary secretary could give us his thoughts on that particular issue. Maybe he could also address the issue of the two boats, in terms of the numbers. However, I am quite interested in his thoughts on the detention centre in Vancouver.